Transportation Industry Leads the Way in Preventive Maintenance

Trucks need to keep rolling. Conveyor belts aren’t much good if they don’t convey anything. Cargo planes don’t move freight if they can’t fly. Ships don’t deliver from under the water. Business logistics managers can’t ignore the importance of preventive maintenance because the costs of reactive maintenance can have a heavy impact on the bottom line.

The transportation industry leads the way in preventive maintenance (see chart, page 29), with more than half of transportation respondents reporting 80 percent of maintenance tasks being preventive rather than reactive, according to the State of CMMS Report 2017 from Maintenance Connection, a provider of Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) and other maintenance software solutions. The report surveyed 1,000 maintenance professionals across 10 major industries—including transportation and manufacturing—to see how they rate their maintenance programs.

Seventy-three percent of all respondents that have a preventive maintenance ratio of 50 percent or higher report cost savings ranging from tens of thousands to millions of dollars. Those statistics become more impressive for transportation because these companies tend to run smaller maintenance teams, with 50 percent of organizations reporting teams of fewer than 15 people.

Transportation companies do lag in a few areas, however. The report shows the industry lacking in mobile CMMS deployments, reporting capabilities, and number of personnel trained and using the software. Improvement in those areas could reap even greater positive benefits on the bottom line.

Manufacturing also held a couple of notable top spots among CMMS users. The report ranks maintenance programs at five levels—apprentice, mover, journeyman, leader, and master. Forty-nine percent of manufacturing organizations report programs at the leader or master level. With 96 percent of master-level programs reporting measurable and significant cost savings from their CMMS implementation, the impact of maintenance programs on manufacturing’s bottom line appears to be overwhelmingly positive.

More than 75 percent of manufacturers also report their CMMS gives them a return on investment ranging from tens of thousands to millions of dollars.

Also of note for transportation and manufacturing, 78 percent of organizations that configure most assets in their CMMS report strong improvements to equipment life span, and 67 percent of facilities that have most spare parts inventory managed in their CMMS report strong improvements to parts availability and time to fix.

Considering longer equipment life and better inventory management can be important cost motivators for transportation, logistics, and manufacturing organizations, improvements in these areas may be worth exploring.

Ratio of Preventive vs Reactive Maintenance

SOURCE: State of CMMS Report 2017, Maintenance Connection

 

Organizations in any industry that perform more preventive maintenance than reactive or corrective maintenance realize a stronger return on their CMMS investment.